Ask An Expert: How Can I Create Great Content for Industry Events?

Today, brands are facing enormous pressure to produce a quantity of quality content on a consistent basis. Unfortunately, resources and budgets often don’t support that need.

One area that many companies are still investing in is sending team members to industry events. Not only are these events full of valuable information, but they present a great content creation opportunity as well. Below are 12 ways that you can create content before, during and after an event to augment your existing content marketing strategy.

Create Content Before the Event:

1. Become a Media Sponsor – 6 months or more before the event, connect with the conference organizer and offer to do a media sponsorship: an in-kind trade-out of event promotion for visibility of your brand to the event audience. This requires a blog and/or email list that’s fairly popular. Media sponsorships can include access to speakers, sponsors and attendees you might otherwise not have. This kind of access can open many doors for content creation from pre-event interviews to co-creation with influencers.

2. Create a List of Top Speakers – Use a social media or influencer marketing tool to rank speakers at the event in some way that is meaningful to your readers. Publish as a blog post and repurpose to SlideShare or as an infographic. Have some fun with themes and metaphors for the overall list.

3. Conduct Interviews – Reach out to the conference organizer, sponsors or speakers at the event that represent topics and brands of interest to your community to do pre-conference interviews. A series of interviews can be branded with a common theme and header image to let readers know there’s a connection to a conference.

4. Write a “What We’re Looking Forward To” Post – Sum up the highlights of the conference and specific presentations that you are looking forward to and why. Themes and metaphors are fun with these types of posts.

5. Create a Resource for Visitors to the City where the event is being held. Curata has done a great job with this type of content by using blog posts and even infographic maps that tie into speaker personalities.

Create Content During the Event:

6. Liveblog Presentations – Before the event, work out a schedule to blog some of the presentations you attend. Most attendees won’t live Tweet, let a lone live blog. This can differentiate your company at an event because speakers LOVE livebloggers and so few people do it. Speakers covered by liveblogging will take photos, trade contact information with you and their brands will often link to your write-up of the presentation, which isn’t bad for your blog traffic or SEO.

7. Create A Daily Roundup Post – Curate other people’s blog posts, top Tweets, speaker quotes and photos (giving credit where credit is due). This can actually be done by someone who is not at the event using social media monitoring tools like BuzzSumo. But it’s better if they do attend.

8. Shoot Video Interviews – Use your smart phone or camera to shoot short videos at the event. Think of a theme and just one easy question people can answer. Compile all the answers into a longer video or similar answers into different videos that can be hosted by YouTube and embedded into your blog post.

9. Publish a List of Event Influencers – Tools like keyhole.co make it easy to identify the top influencers sharing content on Twitter or Instagram using an event hashtag.

10. LiveTweet and Tweet to Blog – With practice, you can easily livetweet a presentation and then turn your tweets into a blog post. Listen and watch for tips, quotes and statistics. You can also combine this kind of information from more than one presentation into a themed list post.

Create Content After the Event:

11. Publish an Event Wrap-up – Compile your experience at the event with links to the liveblog posts, your favorite photos, quotes, tips and Tweets into a wrap up post. What did you like most and what did you not like so much about the event?

12. Repurpose Interviews – Look at your pre-conference interviews, liveblogging and any notes you did not turn into content. Think about them as ingredients and how you might repurpose them into new articles, mix and match style to offer new perspectives.

With the right planning, goals and coordination of resources, you can reasonably create 10 to 30 content assets from a single 2 day event. Plus a cornucopia of social messages, images and shares as part of content promotions and as stand alone messages.

Start your content domination with events by setting goals, researching the agenda and speakers. Make an event content calendar that extends from before the event for pre-conference posts and social content, during event for liveblogging and curating.

Then, after the event with wrap ups, more curation and post conference articles can be published. Even further out you can start repurposing your conference content into other content assets as part of your main content calendar.

The great thing about content domination with events is that 95% of attendees don’t create or publish any content at all (except for a few tweets and social shares on Facebook or Instagram). You can differentiate and dominate at an event simply by doing some planning, a little outreach, monitoring and hustle during the event.